Audit: USPS spent $4M on 'nothing'

The U.S. Postal Service, which expects to lose $7 billion this year, spent $4.3 million on employees who did nothing in the first half of the year because of requirements in union agreements, an audit found.

The amount paid for so-called standby time has “significantly decreased,” down tens of millions of dollars from the amount spent just a couple of years ago, says The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of an audit.

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Labor agreements mandate that postal employees have a certain amount of guaranteed work hours, which means that they cannot be laid off during periods of low mail volume or unplanned events like the breakdown of equipment. This leads to “standby time,” in which employees spend the day doing nothing — for example, waiting in a cafeteria or breakroom.

In fiscal 2009, the Postal Service logged over 1.2 million hours in standby time, costing the agency more than $30 million. This declined to around $20 million in 2010 and is on track to be less than $10 million this year.

The report explains the decrease in standby time by saying that the employee workforce has been reduced in size over the past two years to more appropriately align with expected workload.

However, auditors found a significant amount of Postal Service officials who did not always record standby time properly, which led to improper overtime charges.

Despite a decline in the number of hours that workers are paid to do nothing, the U.S. Postal Service remains in deep financial trouble. In the recently concluded third quarter of fiscal 2011, the agency lost $3.1 billion. “The growth in electronic communications continues to erode core first-class mail volume,” the Postal Service said in a recent release.

The standby workers inspection was conducted by auditors who visited Postal Service processing centers in Dallas and Detroit, which are the two locations with the most logged standby time.

The National Association of Letter Carriers, one of two major postal-employee unions, began negotiations with the Postal Service on a new multiyear deal this month.